Scourge Sixty-One - Temples

“Esme, location?” I ask while glancing over my shoulder. A few of my mantises have come out to follow us, but... I think I’ve lost nearly half of them.

That’s worrying, for all sorts of reasons. That necromancer might be strong enough to really be a problem. I just hope those mantises that we abandoned back there gave more than they took. The poor, brave monsters.

“I need a place to set things down,” Esme calls over to me. “But I think we’re close, and we’re heading in the right direction.” She pats the bag by her hip where she has the card-reading device secured away.

I nod, then continue along the road. The clouds of mist from the necromancer are starting to pour down from above, there’s too much for it to be contained on just one road. I think it’s just mist, but I really don’t want to test it.

We pick up the pace a bit, which is helped by the lack of undead on this road. I guess we’ve moved to a less defended part of the city, or the necromancers are letting the undead clump together and we’ve just bypassed a bunch of them.

I’m not going to complain either way.

We burst into a square. Six roads meet in the centre at a big fountain that looks like it was recently destroyed. A few ghouls are lingering on the road, standing still and staring off in random directions with slack jaws and dead eyes, but otherwise, there’s no one else around.

On each corner of the intersection is a temple. Six of them in all, all facing each other. At a glance, it’s not hard to guess who they belong to. Scaramouche has a pavilion with plenty of space around it for performers. Heroe has a great big building made of marble and pillars. Inclinarse has a more subdued version of the same, though their temple has a stables attached. Gaudium across the street is practically a small park with a few benches and a building that’s half-buried in the ground, and next to that is a Temple to Divinos, which is more of a thin, tall tower with a glass dome.

Mom’s temple is between Divinos’s and Scaramouche’s. Not in an elementally important place, but as far from Heroe’s temple as possible in the square. It’s just a small, dark building surrounded by trees that cast deep shadows onto the temple.

It’s been sacked.

All of them have, really. Divinos’s temple doors are ripped apart, there’s a lot of blood in front of Heroe’s place, and Scaramouche’s pavilion was torn down.

“What happened here?” Felix asks. “Did they wanna piss off all the gods?”

“Some won’t care,” I say as I eye Mom’s temple. Part of me is really, really angry. That’s Mom’s place of worship. They defaced and destroyed it, which is as good as insulting her. Part of me knows that Mom really wouldn’t care that much. After all, one of the reasons I’m here is for me to check up on the temple.

Now I can safely report that it’s in dire need of renovations and that most of the visitors are undead.

“Oh boy, Heroe’s not going to be happy about this,” Lily says with a wince. Heroe’s temple isn’t in that bad a shape. One of the pillars is destroyed, but for the most part it looks alright. I bet a team of... whomever you’d normally hire to fix marble could pretty it all up in an afternoon. Still, I can see why he’d be angry.

“Why go through all the trouble?” I ask.

“Because they’re making a statement,” Bianca says. “They’re turning this city into a one-god place. Anyone who isn’t worshipping Altum isn’t wanted.”

“Got it!” Esme calls out. I turn to find her on one knee, the card-reader on the ground before her with its compass pointing deeper into the city, just past the square with all the temples. “That way,” she says unnecessarily while picking up the device.

We head out, running along the street past more temples, these mostly dedicated to lesser gods and goddesses. They’re in no better shape than Mom’s temple, which isn’t surprising. What is surprising is the sudden shift from temples to mansions.

Not huge mansions like Bianca’s house, but mini-ones, with smaller yards around fairly large homes, none of which are under three floors in height. “I thought the noble quarter was on the west end of the city?” I ask.

“It is,” Bianca says. “This is the merchant’s quarters, and the housing for all of the temples, I imagine.”

I shake my head. Maybe being a merchant pays better than I’d expect. The homes seem largely abandoned at first, but as we go deeper it’s clear that a few of them aren’t. In particular, this one row of mini-mansions halfway down the road. The centre-most is quite large, with a sweeping staircase at the front and a few statues as well. Those have been torn down, but the place is clearly lived-in. There’s people moving about within, and circle of undead forming a thin wall maybe a hundred paces away from the mansion.

At a guess, whoever’s staying in there doesn’t want to deal with the stink of their own undead, so they keep them removed.

My friends and I, as well as our monster escorts, rip through the undead in a matter of seconds. “Should I look again?” Esme asks.

“Wait until we’re inside,” I say. With a whistle, I send some of my wolves ahead and towards the front of the house.

Just as the monsters are charging up the steps the door opens and a fresh-faced young woman sticks her head out. She screams as the first wolf jumps up and pins her down. There’s a lot more screaming from inside the house a moment later.

“I sense... yeah, maybe twenty people in there?” Felix says. “I don’t think they’re all cultivators though, not with the way they’re moving.”

“Normal, non-cultivator cultists?” I ask.

“Or just normal people,” Lily says.

“Wouldn’t they be zombies by now?” I ask.

She sniffs. “Cultists need someone to do their laundry. It’s the same thing over at the Academy. The Commanders have Templar assistants, they have Initiates, and the Initiates can get the novices to do their dirty work. The Novices can rely on a bunch of hired civilians. In the end, the Commander’s briefs need to be washed by somebody, and it’s not going to be by his second in command.”

“Yeah, but they have undead,” I say. The wolves are mostly ignoring the people screaming and flaring around, they instead focus on one man who whips one of the monsters out of the entrance with a big burst of water.

We cut our conversation short as we all jump into action. Felix runs in close, quarterstaff humming as she sweeps it towards the necromancer who blocks the blow with a quickly summoned shield of water.

Esme reminds him that water can be conductive when she fires a hard zap right at the shield and the necromancer’s knees wobble and his focus drops. That’s when my hastily-made dark bolt slams into his head and throws him back into a room joined to the entrance.

More cultivators are showing up, and Felix diverts a watery spear with a twist and wave, sending it spraying away from us. “I count four cultivators left!” she says.

“Got it!” I reply.

Esme, Felix and I have spent plenty of time practising, so we work well together. Felix is at the front, ducking and weaving with a smile and smacking anyone that comes too close. Her wind-magic’s not just strong, it’s precise, which means that she’s basically just playing with the water cultivators, pushing their arms out a smidge with a press of wind and turning their spells around against each other.

Esme, on the other hand, is all power. She’s blasting lightning out, then switching to fire and then she steals the enemy’s water to use it herself.

I’m more focused than Esme, with a bit less versatility and more kick.

Bianca stands back a bit and is mostly focused on disrupting the cultivator’s water magic with her own.

And then there’s Lily.

She roars and runs ahead, the stone floor of the hall twisting up to give her better footing which she uses to get right up in the face of the nearest cultivator. Then she slaps a flaming hand against his face and sends him pirouetting back into a wall with a hard thump.

I stand, magic up and ready, then look around the now ruined main room of the lobby. My monsters are skulking around, looking for more trouble when they’re not growling at the obvious servants who have at least stopped screaming.

“I think we’re clear,” I say.

“Not exactly a challenge,” Lily says as she brushes some embers off her armoured shoulder. “Hey, you.” She points to a girl. “Who are you?”

“I’m just a serving girl!” the woman says. “Please, all I do is clean and do the laundry, nothing else!”

Lily’s smile is infuriatingly smug.

***